What is link building?

Link building is the process of earning hyperlinks from other websites to your own. These links act as authority signals, they tell search engines and AI systems that your brand is credible, trusted, and worth surfacing.

The image below shows how it works. A high-authority website (Page B) links to your website (Page A), passing an authority signal. That backlink acts like a vote of confidence. Create strong content, do effective outreach, and you earn these links, your site gains authority and becomes more visible across search engines and AI-driven platforms.

Types of link building

Digital PR for high-authority mentions

Getting your brand featured in well-known publications and websites. When respected sites talk about you and link to your content, it boosts your credibility and helps you appear more often in both Google and AI-powered results.

Local link building for location-specific visibility

Local links come from nearby businesses, community groups, and local news outlets. They help search engines understand where you operate and make it easier for local customers to find you.

Foundational authority building

The first backlinks created when launching or rebranding a site, they help search engines recognise your business as real and trustworthy. They usually come from business directories, social profiles, and relevant forums like Reddit or Quora, mostly pointing to the homepage under your brand name.

Broken link building

Find outdated or broken links on other websites and offer your content as a replacement. A simple value exchange: you help fix their page, and you gain a quality link in return.

Skyscraper link building

Take popular content in your industry, build a stronger and more useful version, and share it with the sites linking to the original, positioning your brand as the smarter, more up-to-date choice.

What is a quality backlink, and how does it help SEO & GEO?

A quality backlink is a link from a trusted, relevant, and authoritative website pointing to your own. It acts as a public endorsement, signalling to search engines and AI systems that your brand is credible and worth recommending.

In SEO, quality backlinks help you rank higher because they strengthen your site’s authority. In GEO, they shape how often your brand is mentioned, recognised, and included in generative results. That makes link building a core part of modern authority building.

editorial.link surveyed 500+ SEO professionals across Europe, the UK, and the US: 73.2% believe backlinks affect the chance of appearing in AI search results like ChatGPT, most noting that high-quality links improve both a site’s authority and its organic ranking.

White hat vs black hat backlinks

White hat backlinks are earned naturally through valuable content, genuine relationships, and legitimate outreach. They follow search engine guidelines and build long-term authority and trust.

Black hat backlinks come from manipulative tactics: buying links, spam networks, automated placements. The shortcuts may produce quick gains, but they risk penalties, lost visibility, and long-term damage.

For modern SEO and GEO, white hat link building is the only sustainable approach: it strengthens your authority for the long term.

Internal vs external linking

Internal links connect pages within your own website, helping visitors and search engines navigate your content. External links come from other websites pointing to yours, strengthening your credibility.

Both support your link-building strategy, but they play different roles. Internal links guide users and search engines through your content, letting important pages gain authority. External links act as endorsements from other sites that build your brand’s overall authority. Together, they create a connected structure that’s essential to organic ranking.

How important is link building in organic search?

Link building is one of the three core pillars of organic search, alongside strong content and solid technical foundations. Search engines rely on backlinks as signals of authority, trust, and relevance. When reputable sites link to you, they vouch for your expertise, helping your pages rank higher and stay competitive.

Without meaningful backlinks, even great content struggles to reach its full organic potential.

In SEO

Link building remains one of the strongest ranking factors: it validates your content in the eyes of search engines. As competition grows, brands with stronger authority profiles outperform those relying on content alone.

In GEO

Authority determines whether your brand is surfaced, cited, or ignored. Backlinks from authoritative publications increase your chances of being included in the training data that LLMs like ChatGPT draw on for answers.